


An Caoineadh

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshees, Gen, Irish Language, Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-02 00:50:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Lydia screams, Jennifer's garrote twisted tight around her fingers, it isn't for herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Caoineadh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).



When Lydia screams, Jennifer's garrote twisted tight around her fingers, it isn't for herself. The energy of the sound sweeps up from her belly, a confusion of noise and purpose that demands she voice terror, and she's helpless to resist. She could swear that the scream is a live, sentient thing – she's barely able to contain it; it pulses with an energy that stretches beyond the limits of her body and contracts only when her breath is spent. She's limp in the aftermath, lit up with grief as Jennifer puts a name to her keening of these recent weeks. Banshee; the wailing woman; the serpent beneath the innocent flower.

Help comes, and the garrote never tightens to its promised end, and Lydia shakes as Scott tears the tape from her wrists. The threat of screaming lingers – she feels a threefold echo of ebbing power, knows enough to worry that three lives are lost – and her knees are weak when she stands. "Go," she tells Scott. " _Go_." And she's left alone amid a hubbub of teachers and students, hears in fragments of whispered conversation that the pianist is dead.

Two deputies take her statement gently and she tells them all she can. Someone presses a cup of cold water into her hands, and she sips from it gratefully, composure returning, her mind running rings around the lingering urge to panic, willfully pushing that feeling away. She tells her mother she's feeling fine, submits to the paramedic's examination as the shortest route to getting what she wants, lets herself be shepherded out of the room and into her mother's SUV without protest. By the time her mother closes her bedroom door and leaves her alone, she's wide-awake, and she sits cross-legged with her laptop before her and begins to dig to find out who she is.

That she never screamed like this before Peter's bite is so obvious as to be laughable. But when Lydia reads that the _bean sí_ is a solitary creature, she can't help but wonder if the silence her friends wove around werewolves and a kanima made her newly herself as much as any impetus Peter could provide. She presses on, through the fairytales that mask gritty folklore, through ancient books and illuminated manuscripts, though stylized Latin and translations of Irish to the origin stories beneath. _Bean sí_ , one of the fairy people, caught up with the legend of the Morrigan, tasked to warn the family they served of the impending death of someone they loved. Emigrants to the new world, linked to the Ó Grádhaigh and the Uí Néill and the other old families who sought belonging in a brand new place, they keened their sorrow beside rivers that barely knew such power, bent their heads beneath the magic that told them death was near, went into Tir na nÓg, the Isles of the Blessed, and were replaced by their daughters. 

It's nothing for Lydia to call up the names of her ancestors, to trace her roots back to the Uí Conchobhair and the Caomhánach, to recall her great-grandmother's infrequent presence at gatherings, the stories her own mother told of Great-Nan Kavanagh's fervent preference for being alone. And the call to lament died with her, thinks Lydia – rejected, perhaps, by a daughter who served the Church and warded her home with holy objects, who blessed each child who came in and went out, whose superstition was perhaps the fruit of knowing too much and fearing things known, not trusting too little.

Lydia remembers, suddenly, her grandmother's voice at her husband's funeral, the unnatural music of her crying and her own mother's embarrassment – the vestige of an ancient power, the incomprehension of a generation born outside its wake. So now, this – a scream three generations waiting, woken by a werewolf's bite, coaxed alive to fight the moon's rough call.

Yet she doesn’t fit. Her screams have not been for family or friends, but for strangers – for bodies become sacrifice. She is a banshee without root, without an anchor, her power untrammeled and messy, her screams a parody of the keening she's called to do. Her body is a vessel for grief she doesn't look for, for loss to which she bears witness when she shouldn't be compelled. Frustrated, Lydia pushes her hair back over her shoulder, smoothes out the bedcovers beneath her hands. Is this, too, Peter's fault – waking what should have lain dormant, raising magic he knew too little of?

Her first scream was for him. She remembers the night of his rising, the vague sensation of a scream lodged in her throat that she could not make real. It burned and twisted inside her, but Peter's control was absolute – she shudders to remember the unnatural strength with which she pulled Derek to the house, the way she angled the mirror to illuminate death with moonlight, the strange precision of her every move. And that scream – a scream she could not realize but which occupied each breath, a scream not of terror, but of some strange, persistent grief. The ancient magic inside her had recognized death even as Peter arranged his own living. The lament had curled itself, hot and needy, inside her gut.

She screamed at last when she stumbled away, when, barefoot, she took to the forest, leaving Derek and Peter behind. The sound swept her feet from under her, brought her to her hands and knees in the leaf mold, echoed with a fearsome power she had thought was simple fear. But now she knows differently; now she can name the pull she feels in Peter's living orbit as the need to witness, to name him Death. His life bumps into hers as a physical presence – a pressure in her lungs, in her throat, in her belly; a grief that wells in the curve of her elbows and the hinge of her jaw. His name, brought up in conversation, makes her chest constrict with a readiness to keen; objects he's touched make her press her fingers to her mouth to hold back a howl.

She thought she was afraid, marked by his violation of her mind, her body. But sitting in her bedroom, a dozen tabs open in her browser window, her journal at her elbow, she realizes all the power is hers. She knows him, knows him better than anyone else with whom he interacts, recognizes the lingering shade of death at his heels. He is half of this world, and half of the next, and it's his weakness to have no solid footing in either place. 

Lydia closes her laptop, pulls the covers to her chin, and slips into sleep.

*****

She wakes to a world still reeling. Her phone buzzes with texts – the Darach, the hospital, the Alpha pack – and amid all this she readies for school, prepares to show her face in the place she was injured. She feels a preternatural calm settle over her as she thinks of who – of what – she is, and she turns down her mother's offer of makeup to hide the ligature marks on her neck, confers happily about the best way to wear her hair. In the end she lets her mother sweep it up, as if to show off the bright red line at her throat. Perhaps that's exactly the point.

The day spins out into a hundred versions of itself. Stiles panics – loses breath and focus in the middle of the hallway, his cell phone screen still bright with the news that Allison's father is gone. Lydia kisses him into stillness, feels in the moment after that she's the furthest from screaming she's ever been, explains the mechanics of holding one's breath even as she can still taste him on her lips. It feels as if something has shifted between them, as though something has broken and something new has taken its place, and she sits on the floor, nudges Stiles' knee with her fist, jokes about Ms. Morell to cover her awkwardness. It's Stiles who realizes Ms. Morell could help them figure out where the parents might be, Stiles who glances in Lydia's file and sees the pattern in the trees she draws, Stiles who sends her to Derek and Peter both.

It had to happen, she reasons – at some point she had to meet him again, and what better time than when she understands the power of her voice, the shadows conjured by the sweep of her pencil, the silence she can conjure with a kiss?

Peter opens the door to the loft, and she feels the old grief of the _bean sí_ pour into the spaces between her bones, knows she could scream and betray that she knows his secret. Instead she stares him down, a low flame of triumph burning in her chest.

"You."

He looks chagrined. "Me."

It isn't enough. " _You_."

And he hears enough to bow his head and set his jaw. "Me." He looks, for a moment, pained and guilty, then says, "Derek, we have a visitor." He gestures her inside with a flourish as if to distract himself from the candor of her gaze.

She steps inside the loft and knows in the warning she could give that she's healing. Nothing makes her invincible, not even this, but fright and fear have only so much they can take from her. She knows what will come, and when, if not why. She may be standing in a graveyard, but it's with clear and certain sight.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to siria for her help with the Irish language, and information about the _bean sí_. I stayed as close to the folklore as I could, while still incorporating Teen Wolf canon. Grateful thanks, too, to dogeared, for betaing this story.
> 
> In English, An Caoineadh is The Lament.


End file.
